It's very tasteless for Bachmann to brag about having foster children.

Who does that? Don't you usually let someone else laud your charity towards others?

It's similar to bragging about helping the Smiths down the street pay their mortgage. Or giving the Johnson children rides to school every day when they didn't have a vehicle.

Plus, she did receive financial aid to assist her with helping others.

I wonder how the children feel about Bachmann capitalizing on them. Tacky, tacky, tacky.

craziness than that. I don't think the foster children thing is a winning strategy for us.

I'm not trying to use this as strategy. It's my opinion on how tasteless it is to tout the people you have helped.

of this forum. Sorry I didn't spell it out.

government handouts needs to be shouted from the rooftops. It doesn't fit her rhetoric at all.

...wonder what they'll have to say.

and talked about Michelle Bachmann as a foster mom in glowing terms, there would be some here who would insist that they had been bribed or coached or were in some way delusional.

Because, you know...those people have a vested interest in believing the absolute worst about Ms Bachmann above and beyond her political leanings.

:eyes:

I'm not an apologist for anyone.

I just don't think it's our best interests here for people to be hypocrites.

If some beloved Democrat did what Ms Bachmann has done with foster kids, that person would be a saint here.

Nobody would be calling for that person's grown foster kids to come forward to prove that they weren't abused...or, at the very least, misused.

People yell and screech about double standards when it comes to things like (R) scandals vs (D) scandals. "It's not fair! It's not fair!" they whine.

Then they go on to treat someone they don't like in a different manner than they would treat someone they DO like even if the acts were the same.

It's hypocrisy.

And, you know, it makes all of us look like idiots.

You call it being an apologist.

I call it pointing out hypocrisy so a place I like (DU) doesn't end up looking like a loony bin full of assholes.

whatever.

and a whoooooole lot of crazy.

but I'm afraid I just don't have the necessary stamina for it. I had a hard time watching the clips later.

Welcome to DU!!! :hi:

effective public speaker, if you don't listen to what she actually says that is. Evidently persistence can sometimes overcome the "crazy" liability.

That and $4.00 will buy a cup of coffee but won't win the office of POTUS.

which can later translate into speaking fees, book deals, and if they're REALLY lucky, a gig at FOX. The more extreme and right-wing the message, the more publicity. Who needs to "be" president, if you can work less, make more money, and feed your ego just by running for office?

Considering that Bachmann has publically trashed Palin, clearly she wants to be taken more seriously than to be perceived as a Palinesque famewhore.

Her political ambitions seem to be genuine, which makes her scarier to me. Palin is a self-centered opportunist, always promoting herself. Bachmann is sincerely promoting an agenda and shouldn't be taken too lightly. When she first showed up on the political scene, I thought she was a joke. I'm not so sure anymore. I can't see her getting close to the White House, but I can see her as a potentially dangerous force.

about us by accident, but really, how many of us here haven't bragged...even once...about something we've done?

People talk about how they give to charity...help the homeless...etc.


Here. At DU.

I think it's only natural for people to self promote and there are VERY few people I've known over the years who kept all their good deeds totally secret.

So if ordinary people brag to some extent, why should it be verboten for politicians? Why should we turn up our noses with disgust?

This is something I notice, in politics and in other areas. President and Mrs Obama have done a very good job at keeping their children from being used too much,just enough so they can feel part of the family work. They have handled that better than any politicians I have seen and as good as anyone in the public eye. It is one of the things that I will gladly praise them for, they have been excellent parents in what can only be called a very difficult parenting environment. Barack is a politician, and I know he could see many times when those kids could have made hay for him, which he declined to do, and saw to the making of his own hay. I have immense respect for them in regard to how their children have been presented to the public. It is so very much not an easy thing, and they have excelled.
Bachmann, she's shouting to her right hand what her left hand did. And she is doing so using those children as rhetorical fodder. I do not respect that at all, although the fostering is to lauded, the exploitation of it is not.

What child grows up in 7 years? More lies.

What we know for sure is that welfare queen Michele Bachmann found a convenient way to score some tax-free state money in Minnasota.

they may be there a week, or they may be with the family for years.

However you are correct in that she did not raise 23 foster children

...the only thing she's done that she can rightly defend, instead of hammering her on ANYTHING AND EVERYTHING ELSE!

I say let this one go. Not because it's tasteless for her to brag (it is), or because I've never taken in a foster child (so what?), but because this is something she can easily score points on.

:patriot:

We have enough on Bachmann without questioning things she says about her children

of these children, & if they're minors, is she an absent foster mother?

Certainly there are rules/laws that must be followed when children are entrusted in your care. Do they bend the rules for Bachmann?

It could also be the twenty-some children were under her care for a very brief time.
:hi:

she was the one that brought the subject up three times in the debate to prove she was worthy of being your president.

Are people free to question things when a politician brings up the subject??

for political leverage.

unrecommending this...A lot of trolls onboard lately.

I don't understand why people like it so much.

I have poor friends that have lost children due to economic issues and then the state puts them in someone else's home and gives the foster parents all the money they need to care for them. Sometimes it's not fair at all.

I actually know a Democrat who was a foster parent- ran for office and talked about it during her campaign. One thing politicians always talk about is their families. The public likes to hear about families and considers parenthood a virtue. She's just playing mommy for the crowd.

I don't think she did though.